eight bits (idea)

Almost any transfer protocol and storage facility that is used with computers is byte-oriented. (At least.)

Since ASCII, many english-speaking programmers think that any text doesn't have any other characters then what fits in ASCII, and if they do, the eight bit is there wrongly, and strip it. This stops people from using character sets like iso-8859-1. Workarounds has been made, like quoted-printable in MIME.